that kind of music that radioactive man plays.

You go to electronic music nights in london you mainly get pretty techy house, dubstep, some drum & bass and occasionally, about 1% of the time something a little weird that you can't really put a name to. A huge example of someone not giving a fuck about any fashions or trends that occur in dance music, it is Keith Tenniswood, also known as Radioactive Man and one half of the 2 lone Swordsmen with Weatherall. Tenniswood's Radioactive Man moniker has always proved to be that 1%, the music he plays stems from the detroit scene of the 80s.



Not only are you likely to hear any number of the Transmat records during a Radioactive Man set but you could also hear one of those nasty Acid Techno records that everyone else seemed to have left behind in 1993.



Much of what you hear a Rotters Golf Club night are re-edits and remixes of tracks that Tenniswood produces himself because there doesn't seem to be that many producers out there that would make the kind of music he would play, in turn there aren't that many DJ's who would pull out a Radioactive Man record from their box.



Although I would blatantly play this, if I could find 5 tracks of a similar speed to play beforehand.

There other artists who make similar music to him but its stuff you just wouldn't expect to hear in the main room of a commercial nightclub and as such he tends to be more at home in the sweatboxes in Dalston than in Ministry of Sound, although he is quite regularly at Fabric scaring the shit out of the tourists.

With tracks like this...



Or This...



and here is another prime example of the sort of thing he might play.



It is not really music that has a name but it has a very distinct sound, the disjointed jittery breakbeat, 135 to 150 beats per minute, vocodered robo-vocals and an incredibly industrial sound. there was a minor 'IDM' revolution in Berlin in the early 90s and clubs like Tresor would commonly play music like this, alongside the Acid Techno DJ's, then everyone started listening to synth pop and electroclash and this music sort of disappeared. Until the internet, of course.



(note the twisted David Bowie vocal sample)

It reared its head again when there was a Breakbeat revival in the early Noughties and Tenniswood would share billings with the Stanton Warriors and Plump DJ's but there were a million miles apart.

occasionally quite nasty dubsteppy or jump up garagy elements enter the mix, dubstep happens to fall at half the speed of this hybrid of breaks, techno and electro, so it doesn't sound out of place.



It's always nice to hear the vicious old 2 Lone Swordsmen tracks, particularly the more Tenniswood sounding ones, and they often get an outing too, but the quintessential track from this genre which I can only really call 'that kind of music that Radioactive Man plays' is this one...



His latest collaboration is with Techno legend Billy Nasty, releasing on Craig Richards new record label, at the moment only available on vinyl, which is pretty novel and retro and all those other kinds of kitsch values that come with a vinyl only release, here is a snippet from the ep.